JOHN DEWEY
even into the secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the production of specialists—that they detract from our present system of generous, liberal culture. The point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art.
Mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as Dewey said it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. His method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise.
We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies. We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.
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